Available From UC Press

This extraordinary collection, a trove of enchanting designs, appealing colors, and forgotten motifs that stir the imagination, features an unprecedented assortment of ephemera, or paper collectibles, related to food. It includes images of postcards, match covers, menus, labels, posters, brochures, valentines, packaging, advertisements, and other materials from nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Internationally acclaimed food historian William Woys Weaver takes us on a lively tour through this dazzling collection in which each piece tells a new story about food and the past. Packed with fascinating history, the volume is the first serious attempt to organize culinary ephemera into categories, making it useful for food lovers, collectors, designers, and curators alike. Much more than a catalog, Culinary Ephemera follows this paper trail to broader themes in American social history such as diet and health, alcoholic beverages, and Americans abroad. It is a collection that, as Weaver notes, will “transport us into the vicarious worlds of dinners past, brushing elbows with the reality of another time, another place, another human condition.”

William Woys Weaver is Director of the Keystone Center for the Study of Regional Foods and Food Tourism. He has written fourteen books, including Heirloom Vegetable Gardening and Pennsylvania Dutch Country Cooking, both of which received Julia Child awards. A contributing editor to Gourmet, Weaver has also served as Associate Editor and Art Editor for The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture. He has appeared on many national programs, including “Good Morning America” and NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

"William Woys Weaver's personal collection of food-and-drink ephemera is a marvel of culinary Americana, and we have the chance here to visit it with Weaver himself as our guide. It's impossible to stop turning the pages of this dazzling book. Few works in any genre have captured so precisely and memorably the interplay of food, design, technology, business and popular culture. Food-lovers, professional and otherwise, will find that every one of these provocative images inspires new questions, fresh ideas and enormous delight."—Laura Shapiro, author of Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century

"This wonderful new book is not to be missed by collectors, gourmets, or anyone nostalgic for the dishes grandma used to make!" —Arthur H. Groten, President of the Ephemera Society of America, www.ephemerasociety.org